#6 | Marketing isn't about perfection. It's about progress, timing and relevance.

Hi Everyone!

Let’s talk about perfection today. Because there’s no need to be perfect. Our strive for perfection hinders our creativity, growth and productivity.

Instead, focus on learning and growing slowly. Allow yourself to take risks and make mistakes.

Enjoy reading!

Don’t strive for perfection. Because perfection prevents us from making actual progress.

Many of us want to be perfect. And so do I. Too often, I want to master skills from the very beginning, create flawless content, I want to achieve things quickly. And that’s unhealthy.

Because we need to be careful if we want to grow. It takes time to learn a new skill, or create a product. And we’ll likely make some mistakes as we learn and create. And that’s the thing: we should not beat ourselves up when things don’t go as planned. Because reaching perfection is difficult, if not impossible.

What matters more, is striving for good and growth:

My candidate for the best Christmas Advertisement of 2021: Peloton! Do you remember their cringy 2019 Christmas ad? This year, Peloton created an extremely timely and relevant ad that was entertaining and educating! 

Let’s take a look at why their ad was so successful:

In the first episode of And Just Like That, Mr. Big dies from a heart attack after completing his 1000th ride on his Peloton home trainer.

This didn’t sound right to Peloton. Two days after the launch of the series, they launched an advertisement that responded to the unlucky ‘death’ of Mr. Big.

In the ad, we see Mr. Big and Carrie in their living room. Mr. Big asks Carrie to “take another ride. Life’s too short not to.” The camera then zooms out, and we see two Peloton bikes pop up. Mr. Big and Carrie are ready for another Peloton ride.

The narrator tells us that regular cycling stimulates and improves our heart, lungs and circulation, which reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Mr. Big is more than alive!

With this advertisement, Peloton prevented any possible brand damage (Be aware that there are people who find it hard to distinguish fiction from reality) and showed the benefits of biking in a light and humorous way. Peloton even had one of their cardiologists explain why Mr. Big had a heart attack: “It’s because of his extravagant lifestyle”

The ad was received very well, with 16K+ Retweets, over 60K likes, and many positive comments. Great publicity for Peloton, and all that for an advertisement made in less than 48 hours. 

If you want to create a popular, timely and relevant campaign like Peloton, you need to act quickly and you need to take risks.

The goal of Peloton’s campaign wasn’t to create a perfect ad. It was about getting the word out as quickly as possible, so that they could give a relevant and timely response to the “And Just Like That”-episode.

David Griner wrote an excellent thread on that explains how a campaign like that of Peloton can be executed this quicky. The main takeaways:

Click on the Tweet below to unfold the entire thread

Hopefully you enjoyed this newsletter issue! If you want to read more of my newsletters, check out my main page and make sure to subscribe!

See you next week!